


The Merchants of Death

by quiet_wraith



Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types
Genre: District Six, Gen, Heavy Industry, The Capitol, Worldbuilding, lots of headcanons, oligarchs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-12
Updated: 2020-08-12
Packaged: 2021-03-06 06:35:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,266
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25859056
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quiet_wraith/pseuds/quiet_wraith
Summary: President Snow may be the undisputed dictator of Panem, but it is the industrialists who run it. Oligarchs hold entire industries in their hands, doing as they please so long as they fulfill quotas. And from her office in the Capitol, the merchant of death manufactures the weapons that will one day be turned against the workers who make them.
Comments: 18
Kudos: 13





	The Merchants of Death

She is the uncrowned queen of Panem; her husband, the prince consort. Her daughter is the heir apparent, her grandson is raised knowing that one day, the invisible crown will be his. She is Alexandra Chaterhan, sole proprietor of the Steelworks, the largest conglomerate in the world. The anti-monopoly laws that remain on the books are so much ink and paper if they are not enforced.

Once, iron wed coal under a sooty sky, and their child became the ruler of the world. Like any other happy marriage, it ended with the death of one of the partners. Wind turbines and hydroelectric dams and solar panels replace coking coal, and steel is very happy with its step-parent.

All over Panem, workers labour for the Steelworks. Iron ore is torn out of the ground and brought to the surface. With the addition of chromium and a few other elements, it is turned into stainless steel. And out of the steel emerge finished goods and components that have yet to become something greater.

Train wheels.

Forks.

Munitions.

The Steelworks is a monopoly, a many-legged octopus that holds in its tentacles entire swathes of industry. Alexandra Chaterhan holds her finger on the pulse of the country. Quotas are set by the Ministry of Resources, and Chaterhan always fulfills them. Rumour has it that she is more powerful than Snow himself. Town and even District mayors are hired and fired as she commands. Forced labourers are sent to the Wilds to work on the Hunger Games Arenas as a token of her loyalty.

As soon as a Six teenager ages out of the Reaping, there is a new lottery into which their name is entered. This one is nowhere near as implacable in its lethality - one can pay to have their name removed, and to be chosen does not mean death. It merely means that one has to spend four months working on one of the Arenas for meager pay. Officially, they are volunteers. In practice, they are almost slaves. In underground caverns and on bare earth, under freezing rain and scorching sun, they work until their sickly husks are released back to their homes once their four months are up. 

That fate is envied by the prisoners sentenced to forced labour in perpetuity. For them, freedom only comes through death.

Nobody knows who will succeed Snow, but Chaterhan has heirs. When her daughter proves to have no interest in running the conglomerate, Chaterhan does not worry for long, even though she is already past eighty. The direct line of succession will still be assured. Her wastrel daughter has a child, the twenty-year-old Antonius, or Toni as he is still called then. The slender business major with the adolescent smile now plans for the day when he will take up in his narrow hands a conglomerate that owns entire Districts.

Chaterhan, however, is not all that the Steelworks is. The Steelworks is the workers who mine the ore, refine it, turn it into steel. Next to the machines they use, the workers are mere ants scurrying between gears a human height in radius and chains with links the size of a human waist. The assembly-line worker whose six-year-old child works next to them and the skilled gunsmith whose sixteen-year-old still attends school - each of them is a tiny cog in the vast machine that is the Steelworks, each of them replaceable.

The miner who descends into the ground day after day and the accountant who sits in an air-conditioned office.

The foundry worker and the foundry manager.

The mechanic who carries their baby strapped to their back as they fix trains and the train driver who takes their children along so that they can see something that is not their home city.

No matter how much they earn or whether they wear a blue or white collar, if they are from the Districts or from the Capitol, they are Steelworks employees.

Electricity is produced in Five, and iron ore - in Six. The two are in a long-distance relationship, but they make it work for the sake of their child. Steel’s adopted siblings, the various alloys of aluminum and titanium, are also happy with the arrangement. They may be forgotten because of the name the conglomerate bears, but they know that they are just as important as their more-famous sibling.

Hip replacements.

Corrosion-resistant pipes.

Hovercraft.

The seemingly clean air of the industrial cities of Six, an accidental byproduct of the end of the hydrocarbon age, contrasts with the poisoned ground out of which the rural denizens of the District grow their living. Chaterhan cares not for ecology. If a fishing village catches only corpses, that does not affect her profit margins.

Civil industry is based in Six. Military industry is in the hands of the Capitol. Once bitten by Thirteen, the government now keeps its weaponry very, very close. Every single gun and bullet produced in Panem comes from the munitions factories of the Capitol, as does the surgical equipment few in the Districts ever get to as much as see. The overworked and underpaid Capitol workers are kept placated by social programs (Chaterhan is no innovator on that count) and by the spectre of the Hunger Games (that, now, is a creation of the new Panem.)

Chaterhan and her fellow industrialists own the country. Flick of the stoneworks and quarries, Ologu of the pharmaceuticals, dyestuffs, and rubber, Noormohamed of the textiles, Kim of the electrical works - Chaterhan may hold the whip hand in the power plants that she owns, but there are many more she cannot lay claim to so easily, and Snow does not want his lapdogs to become too powerful - they all run their personal fiefdoms, intriguing and scheming against each other. 

There is one thing that they can all agree on. Workers are to be seen and not heard. Every year, activists who dare to whisper outside the safety of their kitchens are imprisoned and executed, whipped and dismissed from their jobs. To stand up publicly, to assert one’s rights, to strike, to sue, to complain - completely out of the question. Impossible. Suicidal.

Eventually, even Chaterhan has to step down. Her grandson Toni, or Antonius as he is called now, takes over more and more of the operations with each passing year. By the time it all comes crashing down around them, he is months away from becoming the sole proprietor. He never becomes it. Alexandra Chaterhan dies peacefully in her bed of old age, but Antonius dances at the end of a rope. 

In an unprecedentedly fast antitrust case, the Steelworks is de-monopolized, with what was once the management of a massive conglomerate splitting up to take charge of their own, smaller but still massive, company. And this time, the shares are not all owned by five members of the same family.

Now, heavy industry is not a placid swamp. It is a battleground. 

Steel is still the ruler of the world, and iron ore and electricity - its proud parents. Munitions makers still manufacture death and sell it for a handsome reward. But corporations now have to fight for each customer, for the ability to continue mining ore and turning it into metal for further transformation into spoons and ICU beds and artillery shells. Foreigners join the scrap as well, buying up mines and factories. The uncrowned kings and queens of the world now own Panem, and when they visit their holdings, the miners gathered by the entrances and the workers on the factory floor can just barely make out the invisible crowns on their heads.


End file.
